The introduction of virtual reality has brought new applications to the forefront in addition to improving several existing technologies. One improvement over existing technologies can be seen in the case of 360° immersive video, also variously referred to as panoramic video, 360-degree video or 360 video, and the like.
360-degree video offers the user with an immersive “being there” experience. The increased immersion of virtual reality can easily be applied to video, providing superior user experience over the traditional video that is projected on flat surfaces. The popularity of navigable 360-degree video systems has also grown with the advent of omnidirectional capturing systems and interactive displaying systems, such as head-mounted displays (HMDs) or headsets. However, content providers have been contending with bandwidth constrained network environments to deliver 360-degree video content in an efficient way in order to ensure a satisfactory viewing experience because 360-degree video assets are ultra high resolution spherical videos, which contain an omnidirectional view of the scenes requiring enormous amounts of data.
Current 360 video headsets are 2K-resolution display devices, covering 1K per eye. In order to achieve the best quality in the headset, a typical network requires sending an 8K 360 video stream to the device. It is known that video compression allows efficient utilization of bandwidth in a media streaming network by reducing the number of bits to represent a picture. Whereas advances in video compression technologies continue to grow apace, several lacunae remain in the field of 360 video delivery and display with respect to efficiently managing bandwidth in today's network architectures, including the ability to provide enhanced viewer control in a 360-degree video playback environment, thereby requiring further innovation as will be set forth hereinbelow.